I remember the early days of Facebook when you used to need a college email address to join. It was great — you felt like you were part of an exclusive club.
Bluesky, Jack Dorsey’s Twitter clone alternative, is finding that a lot of people want to join that club — 100,000 of them, as a matter of fact. According to statistics from Jaz, the social media app has already crossed 100,000 users despite still needing an invite in order to get access to it.
Over 57,000 users who have signed up have posted on the network and users have already crossed 3.1 million posts over the course of its existence. That’s not bad for a social network that is still not available publicly. According to Bluesky’s website, the service will be available publicly “soon.” Those who aren’t one of the first 100,000 can still sign up for the waitlist to be notified when they are able to sign up.
Bluesky is being marketed as a micro-blogging platform, like Twitter, that, instead of being centrally controlled by Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk, is decentralized. The platform is built on the AT Protocol, the decentralized technology that Bluesky is really focused on. A decentralized system would allow users to post and access content across services as well as move their audiences around with them.
The goal of the AT Protocol is to allow modern social media and public conversation online to work more like the early days of the web, when anyone could put up a blog or use RSS to subscribe to several blogs. We believe this will unlock a new era of experimentation and innovation in social media. Researchers and communities will have the ability to jump in to help solve the problems social networks currently face, and developers will be able to experiment with many new forms of interaction.
As Bluesky prepares to launch publicly, other decentralized networks like Mastodon already exist. It’ll be interesting to see how these decentralized networks will compete with each other as well as if they’ll be able to take audiences away from the centralized networks we’ve all been accustomed to for the last decade or so.
As Twitter gets ready to compete with Bluesky, Instagram is also close to launching its own Twitter competitor.
